The 3d Battalion men picked their way gingerly over the pile of rock and flesh and advanced another mile to the entrance of Tunnel 6, the last tunnel before Torbole. This tunnel curved in the middle, its far end lining up directly on the town of Torbole. Germans in the town had no intention of letting the Americans safely out of this tunnel either; they sprayed machine-gun and pom-pom (20-mm antiaircraft) fire into their end of it. Ricochets reached all the way to the south entrance, where L Company stopped short.
A meeting of 86th Regiment officers and noncoms gathered just outside the Tunnel of the Dead to plan what relief they could for L Company. Suddenly, a trio of 88-mm air bursts rent the air overhead and sent all of the men scrambling into the tunnel—back in among the German dead.
At this time David Brower’s battalion command post was located quite comfortably behind Tunnel 4 at the only spot where he could maintain radio contact with both the overland traversing companies and with L Company ahead.
It was sunny, shrubs and annuals around us were showing their springtime greenery, and a few men went down to the lake to fill their canteens with mountain water. An ominous message came back from the Battalion Commander’s radio operator: “Send up all the litter teams you can get!”
Soldiers don’t pale easily. But Lt. Butterwick, who came running back to our CP about then, was pale. A piece of shell fragment an inch across had ripped into, but had not entered, the top of his steel helmet and was still imbedded there, although he didn’t know it. “Major Drake’s been hit,” he said. ‘“They got a direct hit inside the tunnel.”
A one-in-a-thousand shot from the town of Riva (not to be confused with Riva Ridge), two miles beyond Torbole, had burst fifty feet inside the tunnel entrance. Those who were not hit with shell fragments or rock splinters were torn apart by the tremendous concussion, artificially contained within the walls. The lucky ones stumbled away stunned and deafened. In agony, men screamed “Medic! Medic!”—words that were too often last words. The toll in the Tunnel of the Dead—the American toll, not counting the German bodies underneath them—was seven dead and forty-four wounded.
Other units of the 10th had a somewhat easier time of it on Lake Garda, although they suffered needless casualties as well. On April 30, Companies K and M of the 85th Regiment took off across the lake in twelve DUKWs. They came ashore in the town of Gargnano without significant opposition and took possession of Mussolini’s thirty-seven-room villa there, in addition to capturing German tanks and artillery. On the way back, however, afternoon winds capsized one of the DUKWs, and all hands but one were lost.
The 1st Battalion of the 87th Regiment took off overland from Garda’s east shore toward the town of Spiazzi, where the Germans were known to have a noncommissioned officers’ school. The German NCO candidates and their instructors battled the 87th in furious house-to-house fighting. Some ski troopers took refuge in a school and others in a hospital, both of which the Germans then attacked with antitank rockets. After two days of fighting, seventy enemy were counted dead with forty wounded. When the shooting stopped, a booby-trapped building exploded, killing one 87th man and wounding nine.
“Those guys were fierce to the last,” recalled Bob Parker. Parker’s Headquarters Company also participated in what surely was one of the most unlikely scenarios of the war. While the tunnel road was blocked, neither British artillery nor American tanks could move north in support of the 86th, clawing its way toward Torbole. The solution was once again a maritime operation, but there was no way the two-and-a-half-ton DUKWs could carry either a five-inch canon or the heavy tanks. The answer required Parker and others, mostly from the engineer companies, to sail the armor up the lake on commandeered native wooden sailing barges. Under full sail, and riding the afternoon southerly winds, the ponderous barges approached Torbole’s waterfront blasting away like brigantines.
With flanking help from the barges, the 3d Battalion took on the stubborn defenders of Torbole, who fought from building to building and with tanks of their own. The two overland companies from 1st Battalion came in from the rear, after descending a long switchback trail off the ridge. The climbers had suffered a tragedy of their own when, in the predawn darkness, a German bomber, probably just trying to jettison his weapons, dropped them on Company B. It may have been the only time a 10th unit was bombed by German aircraft. Harris Dusenbery came upon the scene in daylight. “Someone had made a partial attempt to clean up. Along the trail there was a gunny sack of arms and legs.” Nine men were killed.
But Torbole was in American hands by noon on the 30th. The 2d Battalion of the 86th took the larger town of Riva at the lake’s northwest corner by 2:00 P.M. Reeling remnants of the German Fourteenth Army withdrew deeper into the mountains toward Trento, Arco, and Bolzano up the river Sarca. No one knew it, but the last battle for Italy had ended.
There was still time, however, for one more tragic twist of fate. Col. William O. Darby, who had led the task force successfully up the lake, was in Torbole meeting with assistant division commander Gen. David Ruffner and regimental staff about continuing the attack toward Trento. The officers had just finished lunch at a hotel in the rubble-strewn downtown when they heard a single 88-mm shell explode somewhere in the town. No one commented on it, and meeting adjourned, the group walked outside in the sunshine to Ruffner’s jeep. Darby climbed into the backseat while the general discussed something with an aide. At that moment another 88 shell hit the building above them. A piece of shrapnel pierced Colonel Darby’s chest, killing him instantly. A young sergeant major was hit in the head and also died.
Stunned by Darby’s death and in desperate need of rest, the 10th took the next two days in and around Riva and Torbole to regroup. The men were issued new clothing for the first time since the jump-off and, David Brower noted, “sleeping bags!” “There were higher, colder mountains to the north”—very high, glacier-draped mountains that dwarfed anything the ski troops had seen in Colorado or Washington. The Germans’ last-ditch Redoubt was very much on everyone’s mind.
And then, at 6:30 P.M. on Wednesday, May 2, new word came by radio. The German army in Italy had surrendered unconditionally. The same broadcast noted the double suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun in his bunker in Berlin two days earlier, but that news caused scarcely a ripple at Lake Garda. Harris Dusenbery remembered the official announcement word-for-word in his North Apennines and Beyond: “Italian Theater armistice in progress. Commanding General 10th Mountain Division orders cease firing except in self-defense. All patrols are called off. There will be no firing of arms in celebration. More details to follow.”
Harry Poschman got the news in a restaurant in Malcesine. Harry’s weapons platoon had been camping out in an olive grove for the previous two nights. Each evening they went down to the harbor with orders to board the DUKWs and motor across to the west shore as part of an effort to encircle the retreating Germans. But each of the last two nights the operation had been postponed because of the bright moonlight. A good thing, too, Harry thought. “The Germans could have picked us off with their 88s just like shooting fish in a barrel.” The word was, they were going the night of May 2, moon or no moon. So, Harry and his friend John Pierpont were enjoying a “last supper” of potato soup and Chianti (“the only things to be had”) when the news came over the radio.
“We toasted with that Chianti. We toasted some more. The Italians went crazy. Their land was free at last. Now I knew I would ski. Shots rang out. The Italians, and Americans too, fired their guns out the windows. I grabbed my soup and wine and jumped into the fireplace, a readymade foxhole.”
John Jennings was sitting in the little town of Torri di Benaco with his company, getting ready to push off again to the north, when he heard. “Most of us were too tired, too dazed to realize the full import of this news, so there was no gay celebrating. Here and there you might hear a murmured ‘Thank God,’ or a very tired ‘Well, I made it.’ The infantry had suffered too much, lost too many comrades to be jubilant.”
Bob Parker’s I&R platoon was out “chasing down this SS unit that had fired on us,” when word came. “We chased them over a pass. We could hear them, see their nail-boot tracks in the mud. They got away.”
Bob Woody heard the news in the form of a cacophony approaching on the road. “There was heavy rifle fire up the road, which was coming our way and increasing in volume. Soon a jeep came bouncing along with tin cans tied on the rear with a guy yelling ‘The war is over.’ Then my company took up the fire with delirious joy. Never have I heard such noise. Rifles, BARs, machine guns all burning up ammunition. Finally, officers had to order us to stop firing for fear someone would be hurt.”
On May 3 David Brower’s battalion struck off for Resia Pass near the point where Switzerland, Austria, and Italy come together. (The 88th Division had earlier been sent to occupy Brenner Pass to the east.) Past Bolzano and on into the night, Brower thought to himself, “Why not turn our lights on?” Throughout the war, tactical situations always required blackout driving. But now the war was over, why not see the road and speed up the column? Lt. Col. John Hay, at the head of the column, had no objection “so a lighted column eight miles long passed through Merano about midnight and continued up the Adige Valley toward Passo di Resia.”
By dawn they were winding up the final grade below the pass at 4,947 feet of elevation. The air was cold, and new snow coated the meadows on either side of the road. The column stopped and sent a jeep forward to make contact with the German area commander. The jeep returned a short time later with, as Brower tells it, a disturbing story.
The surrender in Italy, the German commander had believed, did not apply to [his] outfit across the border, which was still resisting the advance of the American Seventh Army. When they heard that our task force was coming up the valley from Merano, they turned part of their artillery around and registered on the road to prevent our attacking their rear. They had their hands on the lanyards. When our column came into range with lights ablaze, the Germans assumed that something must have happened that they didn’t know about, otherwise we would not have dared to use lights. They took their hands off the lanyards, we advanced to the border, and Jerries and Yanks peacefully patrolled the line—with Yanks in the better billets.
Best of all, many of those billets contained ski gear used by German border patrols. For the weary ski troopers it was the most fitting of rewards. “We took over not only the quarters,” Brower recalled with relish, “but the skis as well, plus the patrol route that included part of the Swiss border and some fine open slopes above timberline for recreational skiing.” The 10th Mountain Division had come home.
CHAPTER 14:
Mountain Idylls
Dave Brower’s group were not the only ones making pleasant discoveries. Soon after the surrender announcement, K Company of the 87th Regiment entered a series of caves near the Swiss border and found them stacked to the ceilings with cases of French champagne and cognac. It was good-quality stuff, too—Mumm, Reims, Ponsardin—all of it stamped RESERVED FOR THE WEHRMACHT. General Hays ordered the loot trucked to the 10th’s division supply depot. It took fifty-five truck-loads to bring it all down. Every man in the division was issued two bottles of champagne and one of cognac. For a time, champagne was free while beer still cost ten cents. The men joked that only the rich drank beer.
Jacques Parker, the illustrator whose sketches of the Riva Ridge climb made page 1 of the Blizzard, took his ration of bubbly to the Lake Garda shore, where he contemplated the miracle of his having survived the war. “This is fascinating,” he thought, through his alcohol haze. “This is where Shelley lived and wrote his poems. So, I lay down on the edge of the lake and looked up at the clouds. It was so quiet and peaceful—the war was at last over. I fell asleep then and woke up at dawn the next morning, hearing these little noises. It was the lake, lapping at my head.”
In the sudden hush of peacetime, division commander Gen. George Hays praised the 86th Regiment assembled in Torbole, near the square where Colonel Darby had been killed. Dave Brower was there and recalled Hays’s words in Remount Blue: “The entire 10th Mountain Division crossed the Po Valley with enemy to the front, unprotected flanks to the right and to the left, and no protection to the rear. . . . Never in its days of combat did it fail to take an objective, or lose an objective once it was taken. Never was so much as a single platoon surrounded and lost.”
Had the 10th’s mountain training contributed to these successes, of which the general was so proud? Clearly, mountaineering skills, especially with ropes and pitons, had made the surprise attack on Riva Ridge possible. The troopers were able to scramble up an escarpment that German defenders had considered “unclimbable”—at least for a battalion-sized force. But what about after Riva, when the division functioned as a standard infantry division, albeit in rugged terrain? Had climbing and skiing somehow better prepared 10th soldiers for what John Keegan calls “the strain [of war] thrown on the human participants”?
In The Face of Battle, Keegan says, “Mountains, like battlefields, are places inherently dangerous for the individual to inhabit; . . . the risk of death always stalks the climber.” Soldiers and mountaineers face “objective dangers.” In peacetime, mountain risks may include collapsing cornices, snow avalanches, falling rock, or the risk of slipping and tumbling. But soldiers must also face the weapons of war: rifles and machine guns, buried mines, artillery, and aerial bombardment. And something the mountaineer doesn’t have to deal with—a clever, conscious enemy. Both groups are subject to “exposure” in “the killing zone.” Climbers are said to be exposed when a fall from the rock would mean certain death. Skiers are exposed when crossing an avalanche path. In war, as with a siege on a mountain, the most exposure falls to the men on the leading edge, the lead climber or skier, the division spearheading an attack. The 10th had been the point on the Fifth Army spear in breaking through the Winter Line.
The relieved and inebriated survivors at Lake Garda credited luck more than anything for their having made it through. John Jennings wrote in his pocket diary: “Slowly, it was beginning to sink in just what it all meant. I realized how lucky I had been to have gone through it safe and somewhat sound. Shrapnel had once grazed a scratch on my thumb and had torn a hole in my shirt, but that’s all except for some near misses. Damn lucky, when you consider that our total regimental casualties were about 1,400. That is 50 percent, even including those headquarters men in the rear.”
Bob Parker also praised luck over any other factor. On the day his unit drove down into the Po Valley, Parker’s jeep came under artillery fire. The driver ditched the vehicle off the roadside, and Parker dove for the cut bank. Lying there as flat and small as he could make himself, Parker heard a terrific whoosh and felt a pounding of dirt and rock across his body. When he could at last look up, he saw the 88-mm shell imbedded in the embankment fourteen inches from his face. Had it exploded, he knew, his corpse would not have been recognizable. But it didn’t explode; it was a dud. Later, when Parker learned about them, he said a silent prayer to the OSS saboteurs, brave conscripts and foreign workers forced to toil in German munitions plants, who risked their lives to jinx the fuses of every third or fourth shell that passed through their hands. There had been myriad close shaves, lucky moments. Everyone had them. And everyone had seen the shattered bodies of men who, in the purposefully casual argot of the living, “got it.” Got it through no fault of their own, no lack of bravery or skill. “Such fantastic luck,” Parker said more than once, shaking his head.
The German army may, in the end, have given the 10th more credit than the exhausted infantrymen gave themselves. Despite early propaganda that belittled the ski troops as “sports personalities and young men from wealthy or politically significant families,” the Germans who fought across the line from the 10th were impressed, and they said so. Gen. Fridolin Rudolph Theodor von Senger und Etterlin, known more simply as von Senger, wrote in his “War Diaries”: “The 10th Mountain Division [was] my most dangerous op
ponent.” His forces had been sent reeling as the 10th, by itself, routed five German divisions, including at least one mountain division, and helped cause “the complete disintegration of the [German] 14th Army.”
When von Senger was presented surrender documents, he asked as a point of honor to be allowed to surrender to Gen. George Hays and the 10th Mountain Division. Appropriately, the surrender documents were delivered to von Senger’s Bolzano headquarters by the young New Hampshire ski racer, Steve Knowlton. As part of the 86th Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon, a nervous Knowlton drove north from Lake Garda in a four-jeep convoy.
Over this ridge was about a jillion Germans, still armed. We didn’t know if they knew the war was over. . . . We came to a little castle and went in. It was just like a movie. There was a guard there, and he gave the Nazi salute and I saluted back and went up to the second floor. The door was open and there, sitting at a desk, was this German officer with a white turtleneck and a blond crew cut. I went over and saluted and handed him the envelope.
Von Senger spoke perfect English. He had studied at St. Johns College, Oxford, before World War I. He was a professional soldier, not a doctrinal Nazi. In this war, he had fought on three fronts, including the Russian, and participated in the brutal, five-month siege of Cassino. He knew about bravery and toughness, and he praised the 10th on both counts. He said later that when his mountain troops were facing the Americans in the Apennine hills, and when he saw the men of the 10th running up the mountainside with fixed bayonets at their positions, he “never in the world [would have] believed that there were American troops with that kind of spirit and that kind of physical condition.”
It was true, Bob Parker remembered: “Our spirit and our mountain conditioning is what got us through the hardest times.” And General Hays put an exclamation point on that in his speech beneath a ruined church tower in Torbole. Standing, hands on hips before a sea of 10th Mountain helmets, he said, “When you soldiers go home, no one will believe you when you start telling them of the spectacular things you have done. There have been more heroic deeds and experiences crammed into these days than I have heard of.”
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